Part 2: The World Machine

There is a prevailing belief I am beginning to question. It’s the belief that things will work out.

When met with the psychological horrors I casually floated in part 1, most people cannot absorb it fully (myself included). We reject, hedge, doubt, or purposefully distract ourselves until the dark hours in our homes — when everyone else sleeps, when we can’t hide from our worst fears anymore.

Suspend that disbelief for a moment. Let’s say that I’m directionally right on my macro thesis. Now how do you react?

What do you do when it seems like everything is breaking? Like, actually breaking? I won’t paint with that brush further. It is a portrait of suffering, up close.

What most people do is respond with hope. We’ll figure it out. I believe in us. Things will work out.

But why?

Why do things work out? Because we want them to?

That’s how people behave when they have no answers. They cross their fingers, clench their butt cheeks, and read the news.

Hope is not a strategy

Hope is just what we do when we don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to do because we don’t understand the problems, what the solutions are, or how we can personally take action right now to make progress on those solutions.

It’s fancy giving up.

I write computer software for a living. There’s a big difference between the people who understand how it works and the people who don’t. They “hope it works”. They accept lazy and lame answers from experts (they have to). They wait around, trying not to bother the people they hope are doing something useful.

Using something doesn’t mean you understand it. When you don’t understand it you have to rely on the people who do.

It’s magic.

But is it really?

Nope. Bugs happen because I forgot to put an exclamation mark somewhere. Or because events happened in an order I didn’t expect. Or because a tool was upgraded and it doesn’t understand my commands anymore. No hope involved.

When you know how something works, like, fundamentally understand how it functions, you don’t have to hope.

A machine functions because an exact sequence of events plays out in the order its designer intended. The marble rolls down the slope, hits the dominos. The dominos trigger the mousetrap which lights the match which burns the string which lowers the weight which pulls down the Happy Birthday banner.

If the marble gets stuck, it breaks. If the dominos don’t tumble, it breaks. If the match doesn’t light, it breaks.

Software is the same. The economy is the same. The World Machine is the same.

Forget that there are more parts, or that no one person could ever understand all of the parts. It’s fundamentally the same at every scale.

The World Machine is breaking because its constituent pieces are not doing what we expect or intend. It’s that simple.

Hope does not factor in.

Just like you cannot replace the dominos, or the match with hope to fix the Birthday Surprise mahine, you cannot fix the World Machine with hope.

First, we must begin to understand how it actually works. It’s complicated!

Time is short and all major change, paradoxically, will be met with active opposition. The cultural immune system is part of the World Machine and it’s broken too. We must be careful not to touch that third rail as we work.

So we’ll need to collectively learn how the world machine fundamentally works, then derive solutions to its problems which do not trigger the cultural immune system until late in the process. We cannot go too slow or it’ll tear itself apart (see: window #2 closing).

:/

If it makes you feel better, there’s a guy who can shoot a pill out of the air with a bow from like fifty feet away. And that’s just one guy.

Collectively we can smash two atoms together at nearly the speed of light in an underground magnetized tube, then study the debris to understand why things have mass. I think we’re up to the task.

(LFG)

We’re clenching our butt cheeks so tight and scrolling our news feeds so fast. We’re hoping so freakin’ hard. BUT WHAT IF THERE’S ANOTHER WAY?

So, what do we do when it seems like everything is breaking? Honestly, it seems unreal that this is a contrarian answer, but here goes…

We just fix it.

Right at the source. As low in the problem stack as we can. Preferably without asking, relying on as few people as possible. The thankless engineers of the World Machine, quietly repairing our social and economic fabric. Let them fuss, and rage, oblivious to our deliberate tinkering. Let them hope.

It’ll work out.

It will work out. It’ll work out because the we aligned the dominos. Because the match lights. Because the people who actually understand how things work fix it. That is why hope works.

Hope is deferring your problems to other people. What happens when there’s no one to “pass the buck” to? Who will fix the world machine then?

This is the answer to how I’m spending my time, attention, and effort. I want to join the team of Fixers. I respond to adversity with action. I respond to more adversity with more action.

What are you going to do?

--

Minting this article funds the creation of more like it. When you fund Collected Live you’re telling us to go find and gather more Fixers. We’ll need them.

Part 3 of this series is more practical. We’ll be covering how I’m investing my money, and more importantly, how I’m protecting it from the kinds of threats most people don’t even know exist. 1 to 0 threats.

Then I’ll broaden the scope to all kinds of defense. We put defense first, because if you don’t protect what you got -- it don’t matter how much you earn.

Next up: Existential defense in the 2020s

Macro predictions:

• I think a shorter cycle has bottomed or will shortly. This is the one people expect

  • I expect a further 20% - 40% (from the top) draw down from here if we go down more

• I think a bigger cycle may bottom within 3 months to 3 years. This is the one people do not expect

  • This bigger cycle is tied to unsustainable consumption, uneven and unproductive wealth accommulation, a jenga tower of debt, excess fiat money (worldwide), and declining human coordination

    • While not the topic of this musing, I believe this wholly an incentives problem solvable by a new kind of human coordination framework

  • Fewer and worse goods

  • Deteriorating infrastructure

  • Debt bubble popping is possible (though I suspect we need to print at least one more big wave before this happens)

  • An unintentionally deep recession (demand destruction — eye roll) could shatter the social and political layer (rule of law) before the financial layer

    • If the social layer does not break when these two troughs overlap this year then it will take another 1 - 2 years more degradation

    • One more system shock would shatter it from then on (pandemic, escalting war, etc.)

  • A broken social layer further degrades the supply chain and infrastructure quality

  • The big print / taxation money dump comes.

  • We whipsaw up then down. This hyper-concentrates wealth

  • Another attempt to print problems away. This time populist (i.e. pitchforks)

  • Money printing cannot solve real-world inefficiency.

  • Snap.

  • Everything changes. The U.S. is the last to fall, most likely, despite prevailing belief we are weakest. We are relatively very strong, even if weak on a historical self-comparison. This is opportunity Window #1 (neutral, but high potential either way)

    • Most of the world is under military rule (including the U.S.)

    • If optimistic, effective, visionary leaders stand and prevail the U.S. military will give them an increasingly longer leash as we build the new world order (better this time!)

      • Note: it’s possible the military splits into separate factions (it definitely has and will have factions), but they are not likely to war at this stage. External threats should keep our physical violence machine from turning on itself for a time. Since the factions are not warring, I’ll treat them as one for now

    • If positive-sum civilian leaders do not prevail… continue down the sad stack below.

    • Opportunity Window #1 closes.

  • Mostly bad for a while until humans either devolve into historical top-down brutality or rally around our new social and tech tools to build pockets of new experimentation at the social and political layers. This is opportunity Window #2. It is potentially long, but painful

    • A relatively clean reboot is not possible now. Most of the world is in tatters as globalization crumbles, borders are redrawn weekly, and ideologies do most of the fighting (but sadly, not all of it)

  • Window #2 closes when one of A or B occurs:

    • A: If those pockets of societal experimentation work well and survive, they will grow and that become the new paradigm in time.

      • If these pockets of experimentation die (potentially murdered), we’ll churn at the bottom of history until one such experiment grows

      • We get a real shot at an incredible future, at the cost of hundreds of millions of deaths and billions living in storybook suffering for an unbearable duration

    • B: An unrecoverable destructive event occurs. This requires no further explanation

Given that macro prediction (Window #1 within 3 years, Window #2 as long as we survive), how does one invest their time, money, effort, and attention?

Those are the next essays in this series, if you want them. If you found this valuable, consider minting this essay as an NFT and sharing it. Reading shows interest, minting shows conviction.

Do you have conviction? Do you like our odds for Window #1? Fleeting attention is cheap. Righteousness is a feeling, not a solution. Cures are more expensive with each tick of our shared clock.

It’s rare that you can move the needle with just ~$20. At the very least, you’ll get my personal playbook.

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